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Comment by polski-g | Hacker News Reader

Bigger lesson is: do not utilize cloud solutions. Your organization's competency floor is set to the least competent employee of the cloud provider.

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I'd disagree with this lesson. Saying "do not utilize cloud solutions" period is nuts. Google and Microsoft are way better at email hosting and delivery than your on-prem server is unless you spend a ton more money on hardware and engineers to keep it up, which is simply not worth it for many companies. Dropbox is going to have better uptime and lower TCO than your self-hosted owncloud instance.

What I will say is it's important for the customer to HAVE THEIR OWN BACKUPS. Don't rely on the vendor - that's the lesson here. If you have all your stuff in AWS back that data up someplace that's not AWS, etc.

There's something humorous when better uptime is cited as a reason to use cloud software instead of on-prem in a thread about a major cloud outage.

I mean, yes, your point is well taken, but I stand by my point nonetheless.

On prem outages and data loss happens constantly. Much more than cloud hosted issues. They just affect a smaller group each time. It's like how people view the countless car crash deaths as non issue but freak out over a rare train crash.

Good luck being able to use, or even make backups of proprietary SaaS offerings.

You can make backups of the data absolutely. There's a whole industry selling cloud-to-cloud backup solutions.

Some examples: https://www.ownbackup.com/ https://www.backupify.com/ https://www.cloudally.com/

Edit: to clarify I would say if the data is important to you, then “the ability to back up the data” should be a requirement when selecting saas. See my other comment in this thread on ms planner.

Have your own backup works only if there are common open standards for export/ import. Email or storage may have those, project management tools don't. I can't simply backup from Jira and start using pivotal.

Even for Email or storage or any other open system, UX changes and feature differences can take a lot of time to train properly, you don't migrate from one vendor to another vendor just like that.

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